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According to CBC.ca News – Police investigate Embrun pileup using controversial technology the Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) are going to be using the vehicle blackbox to try and determine what happened in a multi-car pileup that occurred on February 17 near Embrun, Ontario. Five people die in the accident on the 417 east of Ottawa. So far it has been attributed to a sudden white-out and a flash freeze.

What is most concerning about this is that the OPP plan to use the information gathered from the vehicle blackboxes to lay charges if the blackbox recorded illegal activity. The problem is most drivers don’t know about the blackbox and don’t realize that they are being tracked. Considering Canada’s privacy laws, I find it rather odd that the police are able to use the blackbox data without getting a warrant first. My limited knowledge of legal proceedings would lead me to believe that typically the police can’t get evidence like this without a warrant. Since the vehicle (and I would assume the contents of the vehicles’ crash data recorder) are private property, owned by the vehicle owner, my understanding is the police require a warrant to search the property.

So basically, they are searching private property for evidence, then they are going to get a warrant for that information if and only if they find evidence from the search. Isn’t that backwards?

Hmm, maybe I should be doing some reading to find out how to disable my vehicle crash data recorder. I’m not implying that I do anything illegal, I just want to make sure that Big Brother isn’t always watching, Heck, that’s why I thought we had these new privacy laws in Canada.